


The Easing of Spirits

by Star_on_a_Staff



Category: Fire Emblem Series, Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Ghosts, Alternate Universe - Victorian, Broken Engagement, Eventual Happy Ending, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Fluff and Humor, Ghost!Dimitri, Ghost!Ingrid, Ghost!Sylvain, Gothic, Gothic Au, Past Relationship(s), Romance, Sensuality, Supernatural Elements, Unresolved Romantic Tension, Unresolved Tension
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-22
Updated: 2020-10-22
Packaged: 2021-03-09 00:42:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,086
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27145405
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Star_on_a_Staff/pseuds/Star_on_a_Staff
Summary: Once upon a hill so drearyLived a lord so grim and wearyFor in his sullen house did dwellThree spirits with souls lost and fellBut they happened upon a girlWho wore her hair in reddened curlTheir sorrowful sins she did seizeTo banish them clean ‘pon the breeze.Or; A Gothic/Victorian AU where Annette finds Felix living in a haunted mansion and the ghosts aren't the worst of her worries. Annette/Felix.
Relationships: Annette Fantine Dominic/Felix Hugo Fraldarius
Comments: 10
Kudos: 12





	The Easing of Spirits

**Author's Note:**

> It's almost Halloween! It's time for spoopy (kind of) shenanigans!
> 
> This might remain a WIP, but I wanted to try my hand at something a little more intense and spooky and long. And pining. Gotta write the pining. 
> 
> Vaguely inspired by Crimson Peak and most Dickens novels. 
> 
> Thanks again for keeping up with my shenanigans. It's been a whole year and then some since I started writing for these two. Isn't that poggers?
> 
> Anyways, thank you, and I hope you enjoy!

_Once upon a hill so dreary_

_Lived a lord so grim and weary_

_For in his sullen house did dwell_

_Three spirits with souls lost and fell_

_But they happened upon a girl_

_Who wore her hair in reddened curl_

_Their sorrowful sins she did seize_

_To banish them clean ‘pon the breeze._

. 

.

.

The sun had long since set. The only light that managed to slip through the imposing arms of the scraggly pines were faint ribbons of glowing moonlight, made silvery and tenuous through the shadows of onset storm clouds. 

Annette nudged her horse onward. The dappled grey shivered underneath her, nickering anxiously in the cavernous silence of the forest. The usual clatter of hoofbeats were swallowed in the carpet of pine needles that littered the winding forest road, swallowing each impact in a muffled rhythm that felt like a heartbeat. 

_Thump-thump. Thump-thump. Thump-thump._

Annette tried not to listen too closely to the lulling tattoo. It was already unsettling enough to be this far deep into the woods at this time of night, armed with nothing but a sputtering oil lamp, an silver ring, and the battered and bound script of her first play, _La Ténacité_. Unless she could beat off an assailant with a decrepit paperback, Annette was not optimistic about her choices. 

But she really didn’t have any other options, did she? _La Ténacité_ ’s first production was tonight, and even if her dappled-grey suddenly sprouted wings and flew like the legendary Pegasus, Annette severely doubted she could make it in time. 

But she had worked too hard and too long to make this dream of hers come true, and so at the risk of life and limb, she forged on. 

A fat raindrop smacked Annette’s cheek. She winced and snapped the reins, speeding her horse up to a gallop. 

The pines began to speed by. Grasping, spiny branches seemed to reach out and snatch her right out of her saddle. Enormous trunks seemed to spring out of nowhere, looking for all the world like spines from some monstrous creature that slept beneath the soil of the forest.

Annette shuddered. 

The rain began to come down hard. Annette’s dove-grey hood clung to her face, and oh, how deeply did she regret donning her finest silk in gleeful anticipation for the first production of her play! That sunlit morning, tinged with golden expectation, seemed aeons away from her present and miserable circumstances. 

Annette squinted through her damp bangs. There had to be an end to this forest road, there had to be! Her arm trembled from holding her lantern aloft for so long, and her horse’s heavy panting had grown scratchy at every inhale. They had to find shelter, and soon. 

The pines pressed in around her, sharp as darkness and stubborn as sin. Their distinctive scent curled around Annette, laughing, rancid. Before her, the boughs began to part, revealing a slender copse that widened towards a sprawling hill. 

Upon that hill lay a mansion. 

Annette felt a chill settle deep into her bones. There was no turning back now.

An ear-splitting crack of thunder shattered the skies. Annette yelped and tugged her hood lower, urging her horse on faster. Branches whipped past her cheek, smacking her face with thin needles, nearly upsetting her lantern. Her horse wheezed. The mansion loomed in the distance, growing larger with every stride her dappled grey took forward. 

Suddenly, the forest released her. Annette gasped as the branches let go and she and her horse stumbled out of the tree line and onto the base of the craggy hill. The trees fell silent behind, their leaves mixing in a symphony of sighs that seemed to mourn the loss of her presence. 

Annette cast a very irritated glance back at the tree line. Some shortcut _that_ was. 

She patted her poor horse’s neck, wincing as her glove came away damp with sweat. “I’m so sorry, dear. Just a few more steps, okay?”

The horse leaned wearily into her touch. 

Annette slid off of his back, loosening the bridle so that it no longer tugged at his muzzle and mouth and hanging the oil lamp off of one of the curious metal hooks along his flank. He trotted obediently after her as she led him up the steep, almost mountainous hill upon which the forbidding mansion sat. 

Oh, dear, it really did look more frightening up close. Annette tried hard not to think of all the scary tales that Mercedes loved to ply her with back in their schoolgirl days and focused on maneuvering her horse up the gravel path, following the light of dimly lit lamp posts that lined the road. 

Pines. Even out of the forest, there were still a few of the spiny bastards looming over the gravel path, their distinctive scent giving Annette the shivers. She glared at each one as if they had personally offended her and felt a grim satisfaction when they seemed to draw back and become sparser the closer she came to the mansion. 

Oh, it was a gloomy thing indeed: dark, heavy wood that seemed carved out of the nastiest of ashen trees, a shingled roof made artistically decrepit with a few missing tiles, windows that arched up and up like they were mouths stretching in mad laughter; and a crooked, enormous iron plated fence that marched all the way around the vast grounds of the mansion. 

Annette stepped up to the gate. It was, surprisingly, loose, and when she mustered up the courage to give the metal bars a vigorous shake, the gate swung open with a sullen creak. 

Well. That had never happened before. 

Her horse made a very unhappy sound. 

“Me, too,” Annette told him with a sigh. The wind picked up, lashing rain against her soaked cloak, and she hurried him onwards through the gate and into the grounds of the dark mansion. 

Dry grass crinkled under her boots. There were stone effigies of weeping saints, headless caryatids, and winged cherubs pointing arrows at the sky scattered across the grounds. It would almost be funny how tasteless it all looked if it weren’t for how their eyes seemed to follow Annette as she edged closer to the door of the mansion. 

If the mansion was gloomy from far away, it was straight up ominous from up close. The wood paneling on the exterior of the house was once a dark black; it had now faded to a sad sallow. The door had an actual goblin’s head with a knocker in its grinning mouth; who _does_ that anymore?!

Annette swallowed her fears and pride and obstinately looked away from the knocker as she banged it three times in quick succession. 

_Crack, crack, crack_. 

The echoing knocks rippled through the house. The mansion shook; a crow screamed as it took flight from a scraggly pine that was brushing up against the house like a very forward lover. 

_Stupid pines_ , Annette thought fiercely to herself as she sneezed. Great. A cold was just what she needed on top of all this. 

It seemed like an eternity before she got an answer. She couldn’t hear a thing through the stiff oak door; just the cavernous echo that tipped her off to the immense size of the building. 

Then the door swung open. 

There was no squeak of hinges or scrape of the door’s corners against the wooden floor. It swung silently open, and there he stood, one hand upon the knob and another upon the hilt of the thinnest, sharpest sword she had ever seen before in her life. 

Annette mustered up her brightest smile. 

“Hi, Felix,” she chirped. “It’s been a while, hasn’t it?”

Felix stared at her with faint surprise in his fiercely bright eyes. He cast a swift but analytical glance over her drenched clothes, her muddied boots, and the heaving chest of her horse. 

He cast another glance, less analytical, to the stone effigies outside.

“Come inside,” Felix finally hissed, sheathing his sword with a _shh-thunk_ as he seized her hand and all but pulled her through the door, “Now!”

“Wait,” Annette twisted out of his grasp, “my horse—”

The door swung shut. 

There was a flash of stone wings. Behind the door, a crack of thunder sounded, and her horse screamed. 

O.O

“What the hell,” Annette shrieked as Felix paced before his foyer’s windows, drawing every ebony curtain shut, “was that?!”

Felix peered outside the last open window, his expression unreadable. As he snapped it shut with a swish of curtains, cold, bedraggled, _frustrated_ Annette truly lost her temper. 

“Felix Hugo Fraldarius,” she said in a deadly tone, “you _will_ answer me or I’m going to march right back outside and spend the night under the wings of one of your stupid cherubs.”

“You shouldn’t do that,” he said curtly as he turned back to face her. Through the seams of the curtains, moonlight framed his silhouette in silver. “You could catch a cold.”

“Too late,” Annette muttered as her throat burned. She shook herself. “What about my horse?! He was on loan! What am I going to say to the coachman I had to bribe?!”

“Bribe him again,” Felix suggested curtly.

“I don’t have the money,” Annette said very honestly. 

An awkward silence fell between the two. Felix sighed and ran a hand through the tangled mess that was his hair. Annette started as she finally took the opportunity to look over her host. 

He looked, quite frankly, terrible. His ebony coat hung poorly on his stiff frame. His fingers tapped anxiously on the hilt of his sword. His hair was a rakish mess that fell over his shoulders like a matted nest. How did a person’s hair get so long in five years? And he was paler than death; had he not been eating well?

“I’m sorry,” Felix said tiredly. “I can stable him later. It’s not safe for you to be out there.”

Annette thought that her present surroundings didn’t exactly exude warmth and safety either. The walls seemed bone-thin, and on them hung richly framed portraits of past dukes and duchesses who grinned at her with ashen eyes. Dust motes floated in whatever light source flickered from along the walls; they were too fierce to be rightly called candles and yet too thin to be straight torches. 

_They’re ghastly either way_ , Annette thought fiercely to herself, shuddering as they cast such strange shadows on the walls that even Felix’s sharp face seemed downright friendly. 

“You’re dripping wet,” he belatedly observed. “I can go make us a fire.”

Annette sneezed. “Please.”

He slunk deeper down the hall without so much as an extended hand or word of welcome. Annette trailed after him at a quick clip, trying very hard not to think about the portraits, the stone statues or even the creepy owner of them all who may or may not kill her in her sleep tonight. That is, if she even got any sleep at all. 

The floorboards groaned at every step she gingerly took. The beautiful wainscoting was strung with webs. The deeper they walked into the mansion, the less drafty the rooms became, but Annette still felt the urgent desire to shiver. 

The parlor was handsomer than the entrance hall, at least. Thick bookshelves encased the room in bulky solidity. Richly embroidered crimson curtains swung low over tall, arching windows. The furnishings were carved to sharp edges, only softened by the overabundance of quilts and soft blankets that seemed cheerfully out of place in the otherwise gloomy room.

Felix led her to the enormous fireplace against the left wall, where the chimney soared high above them until Annette could scarcely see where the roof met the stonework. There were embers already simmering in the center of the firebox, so it only took a few logs and a jab from the nearby poker to get the flames roaring. 

After closing the safety screen, Felix straightened and turned towards Annette, who was gratefully stretching out her hands to the blazing warmth of the hearth. “Your cloak.”

“Hm?” Annette hummed, too blissed out by the seductive warmth of the fire to notice her sopping wet coat and hood. She was startled out of her reverie when she felt calloused fingers at her chin. 

Felix wasn’t wearing gloves. 

“Up,” he directed her stiffly, and Annette blinked. “O-Oh, right.”

She lifted her chin. Felix stepped forward, and he began untying the knotted laces of her cloak.

Annette watched him quietly. He seemed so tired. His amber eyes, devoid of their fierceness, were bloodshot. If she lifted a hand to touch his cheek, would his skin be cold to the touch? 

Felix unlaced her cloak and tossed back her hood. “There.” 

Annette shook out her hair. All the pins had fallen out on her wild ride here, and so down came her unruly mess of red bangs. Ugh. She had hoped to look at least _gracefully_ disheveled, not like a bedraggled rat rescued from the sewers. 

But judging from the way Felix was staring at her, she probably didn’t look as rat-like as she’d feared. 

All he said out loud however was “I’ll get you a blanket and a drink.”

“Thank you,” Annette said in a tone that would’ve been inappropriately breathless if her teeth weren’t chattering so hard. 

Felix rolled his eyes at her before vanishing into an adjacent room. She could hear the clatter of glasses, the creak of cupboard doors and the clicking of his boots on the wooden floor. 

Annette sat next to the fire and curled her knees up to her chest. There was a soothing quality to the way the flames crackled and chewed away at the charring logs. The dance and flicker of the fire licked against the stones, a playful flirtation of flame and rock like the ocean’s eternal crashing upon the shores. 

The heat embraced her, and Annette found herself nodding off to the rhythmic crackle of the fire. Her eyelids drooped. Her head fell upon the cross of her forearms braced on her knees. Her damp cloak fell away from her shoulders and pooled over her knees and onto the floor. 

Sleep began to steal her consciousness away. 

Then, a whisper, velvet thin. Smiling. 

_Isn't it nice to be able to feel warmth?_

The fire roared. A spray of sparks gushed from the logs like blood. 

Annette’s eyes flew open in shock. The once innocuous fire had roared to three-foot flames, licking the fringes of the carpet and at the toes of her boots. When had the safety screen flown open?!

Suddenly a new revelation occurred to her. Her cloak was on fire. She was still wearing her cloak. 

“Annette!”

Felix’s shout came to her as if underwater. Annette was already moving, scrambling to her feet and shucking off the cloak while stumbling backwards from the hearth turned inferno. 

She was only dimly aware of crashing into Felix’s chest and of his arms coming up to steady her; she was watching with open-mouthed horror as her cloak was eaten away by the conflagration of unnatural flame that had burst from the mouth of the fireplace. 

Felix yanked her backwards. “Annette, it isn’t safe—”

A laugh ran through the parlor. 

_Safe, Fe?_

Annette shrieked as the windows burst open with a flare of cold wind. The crimson curtains rose upon the buffeting breeze like blood-drenched, gilt-edged wings. 

The laugh hardened into steel. 

_You of all people should know this place isn’t safe._

O.O

“Absolutely not, absolutely not,” Annette muttered as she made a beeline towards the entrance hall with a vicious alacrity. “I’m not staying a moment longer in this house.”

The fire had died down to a sinister murmur shortly after the last rags of her ruined cloak had been eaten to cinders, but thankfully Annette still had her battered script, some fiery alcohol in her system, and the wits to hightail it out of this cursed mansion.

Felix kept pace with her with infuriating ease. “Annette—”

“I’m short of a cloak and a horse within ten minutes of meeting you,” Annette wheezed as the portraits whirled by, their grinning visages be damned. “Both of which were stolen by some unnatural means—”

“Annette—”

“And I thought this would be a good idea!” Annette paused in her tracks, whirling upon Felix with a despairing air. “I wanted to see you again.”

Felix stood stock-still, his face stricken. 

“You stopped sending me letters.” Annette held out her hands. They were empty and gloved and shaking. “I wanted to catch up with you like old times. If it weren’t for the—”

A silent flash of lightning swept past the cracks in the curtains. A crack of thunder made her jump. 

“—the storm,” Annette continued, rattled, “I would’ve kept going through the woods to Enbarr.”

As if in a daze, Felix roused himself. “Why are you going to Enbarr?”

“I was going to see a play,” Annette said glumly. The window seat by the door looked inviting and non-judgmental, and so she sat on the cushioned surface with little care for the dust flouring its silken surface. After a beat of hesitation, Felix sat next to her. The plush pillow barely sank beneath his weight. 

“Was it your play?” he asked. 

Annette nodded. “We were supposed to put on our first production tonight.”

He made an impressed noise. “I would like to see it.”

“I as well,” Annette riposted with a sour laugh. 

“Sorry.”

“It’s okay.”

Another awkward silence fell between them. Somewhere deep within the house, a groan of shifting timbers reverberated through the building, and Annette shivered again.

Something warm and fuzzy enveloped her, and Annette started when she realized that Felix was draping a thick swan’s down blanket around her shoulders. It was rich, luxurious, and smelled faintly of mothballs. 

“Thank you,” Annette sighed, suddenly very tired. All the frustration had bled out of her at this point, leaving a heavy grey feeling of exhaustion settling deep within her gut. “Sorry for getting mad at you.”

“It was justified,” Felix said. His voice curled around her, warmer and softer than the blanket clutched around her shoulders. “I should’ve answered your letters, I just had some...things to work out on my own.”

Annette nodded, her throat tight. She had seen the newspapers clippings of the famous Fraldarius murder; then again, so did everyone who wasn’t living under a rock. 

That unhappy revelation coincided with the publication of _La Ténacité,_ and Annette remembered being torn over feeling delirious joy in the wake of the very first publication of her first play, and feeling sorrow at the death of a very kind man who had once praised her writing as “delightfully original and sure to captivate”. 

She had sent a flurry of letters to Felix when she’d first seen the news, practically emptying out her entire stock of that lovely cream stationary that she’d reserved for only the most special of occasions. Long-winded messages of concern, worry, distress. Shorter letters fringing on sorrowful confusion. 

Then finally, an actual telegraph that she had to cross the city to wire; informing him that she’s planning on visiting his home mansion as soon as her timetable permits because she was just _that_ anxious about him. 

He replied swiftly enough after that. The envelope was edged in black and sealed with the cobalt blue wax of the Fraldarius title. It was a short, intense missive, with handwriting so atrocious Annette had to squint and hold it up to the candlelight for it to be legible. 

“Do not trouble yourself,” Annette had read aloud to herself with disbelief in her study. “I don’t think it’s safe for you to travel here. Stay where you are. I don’t want you getting hurt.”

It was…confusing. A little insulting. Annette remembered being so irked that she had to go on a very agitated walk around her neighborhood. Her temper had cooled to an icy simmer by the time she had arrived home ready to unleash hell upon rude, obstinate Felix, who was obviously so driven out of his mind with grief that he wasn’t thinking straight. 

But then there was a lushly gilded letter from _the_ Mittelfrank Opera Company sitting on her doorstep with _La Ténacité_ ’s title on the top of their program, and suddenly Annette was feeling a very different tumult of emotions. 

But now, all she could feel was guilt as she took in Felix’s face. There had been no news of the fencing protégé for years. Their old circle of connections had dissolved.

He must’ve been as lonely as she was.

 _Still doesn’t excuse him not replying to her letters_ , a bitter part of her reminded Annette jealously.

The mansion moaned softly. A soft echo to her sad thoughts.

Present-day Felix ran a hand through his hair. He hadn’t let go of _that_ habit, at least. “Stay here tonight. It’s several miles to the nearest city and the storms here are dangerous.”

“Alright,” Annette replied, too tired to argue. The mulled wine she had all but gargled into her throat left a burning, insistent warmth inside of her, and it made her sleepy and much too hot.

Maybe that was why she wasn’t as concerned as she should be about that freak accident in the parlor. That’s fine. Maybe she should really invest more in this alcohol business.

“I have a guest room upstairs for you,” Felix was saying as he helped her to her feet. “It’s across from my room, and it’s a bit dusty, but—”

“I’ll take it, Felix, Goddess.” Annette swatted him lightly. “I’ll take even the floor and a blanket if it means I could sleep.”

Felix smiled a little at her, and Annette was not prepared for how deeply the familiar, bittersweet sight sank its talons into her.

 _Get ahold of yourself_ , Annette scolded herself bitterly as they climbed the balustrade together. Her toes sunk into the plush carpet with each step, the silken wood of the railing whispering against her fingers. _It’s been five years. You’re better than this_.

Taking out a candle that seemed to come out of nowhere, Felix ushered her into a rather close but incredibly tall room. The curtains in this room were not crimson, but cobalt blue. They whispered along the carpeted floor as Felix marched briskly from corner to corner, rearranging this, dusting off that.

The stonework along the wall smelled faintly of damp and there was an unfortunately ominous painting of a dark-haired man gazing down at the room above the mantelpiece, but Annette only had eyes for the four-poster bed in the center of the room and its lush, soft comforters.

“Heaven take me,” she gasped as she sank face-first into the covers, a decision that she immediately regretted

“I told you it was dusty,” Felix remarked as Annette resurfaced sputtering, furiously wiping at her mouth and nose. “Goddess, you never learn.”

“What is that supposed to mean?” Annette spat at him as soon as she could feel her tongue again, but Felix just shook his head with some amusement and bent forward to drape that swan’s down blanket around her shoulders again.

 _Goddess_ , Annette thought very furiously as his thumbs briefly brushed the column of her neck, _why did he have to smell like **pines**?_

Felix leaned back. His cheeks were red.

“Goodnight, Annette,” he murmured, handing her the flickering candle.

“Goodnight, Felix,” Annette whispered, taking it from his hands. Their entwined fingers lingered together for a little too long.

He was the first to break away. Annette watched as the swirl of his loose hair followed him into the hallway, then into the dark yawning depths of wherever his chambers were on the opposite side of the hall.

Sitting on the edge of the bed, Annette kicked off her shoes. She withdrew the battered and well-loved manuscript of _La Ténacité_ from where it had been bound to her waist and carefully laid it on the table besides the head of the bed.

Annette wondered how the first production had went.

She crawled into bed, turning up her nose a bit at the smell of mothballs and dust. But the mattress was firm, the pillows soft, and so within a few beats of restless tossing, Annette fell into a deep, fitful sleep that was tinged with the smell of pines and the pressure of the silver ring pressed tight against the hardness of her rib cage.

The ring that she had never returned to Felix.

**Author's Note:**

> Come yell at me on [my twitter!](https://twitter.com/clairvoyancehsu)


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